Europe Swings Right, and World Sits Up

May 22 -- Barely two months ago, Pim Fortuyn was routinely greeted by insults, jeers and an occasional pie in the face. Today, the very mention of his name across the Netherlands evokes tearful sighs, bittersweet recollections and heartfelt entreaties to the Almighty to bless his soul.

What a difference an assassination makes.

A flamboyant politician who combined an openly gay lifestyle with hard-line anti-immigrant views, the dapper, smooth-pated former sociology professor was the black sheep of Dutch politics until he was shot dead May 6 outside a television studio in Rotterdam.

But while his public life was crammed with controversy after shocking controversy, in death Fortuyn seemed to have touched a spot in his nation's — indeed his continent's — soul.

Days after the 54-year-old leader of the Pim Fortuyn List was gunned down, his 3-month-old right-wing party scored a major triumph in the Dutch polls, bagging 26 seats to become the second-largest party in parliament — stunning a nation known for its tradition of tolerance and ringing alarm bells among Europe's center-left parties in the process.

After a decade of the center-left dominating European politics, sociologists and political scientists are now proclaiming the 1990s as an era that saw the final blossoming of the left and its agenda of democratic socialism.

The loudest bells were heard across the world last month, when France's far-right presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, bagged nearly 17 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election to move up to a runoff with incumbent Jacques Chirac.

After weeks of national hand-wringing, political soul-searching and anti-Le Pen demonstrations that sometimes pulled in millions of demonstrators, Chirac won 82 percent of the vote in the second round, a victory that helped allay the European left's worst fears, but offered it no real comfort.

A Slow and Steady Drift

By most accounts, Le Pen's surprise showing is merely the icing on the European right's cake. In the past year, the left has lost power in Italy, Denmark, Portugal, France and the Netherlands. In Britain, the right-wing British National Party has made some gains in local elections, and in Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, the Social Democratic chancellor, is in danger of losing a general election in September.

Fortuyn did not live to see the full extent of the upheaval he has caused — at home and abroad — but many experts say they have seen it coming slowly, but steadily.

"No, this trend does not surprise me," says Simon Serfaty, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I'm surprised simply at how long it has taken the international community to notice the drift in Europe, which is hostile to the center-left."